Affiliate Marketing: Stop Lowballing

If you’ve ever read much into affiliate marketing or read some courses or other informational material, you’ve probably been told to find your niche and get a domain name based around an exact match to the keywords you’re targeting, based on search volumes published by the Google AdWords Tool.

Let me be the first to tell you, good luck with finding an exact match domain name that is available for normal registration, whose exact match search volume is higher than a thousand or two. They’re out there, but they are very obscure, and to be frank, it’s a waste of time anyway to put hours and hours of work, and perhaps investing into advertising, SEO, marketing, etc., based on a domain name with low search volume, if you’re taking an EMD approach.

The trick is to stop lowballing when it comes to picking out your domain name. Stop scrounging around low search volume keywords and find one that looks great, with an exact match domain that is available via auction or buy it now price that isn’t astronomical. I would say $300 or less is a good range. The reason is that you’re just starting out, but consider this: If you were doing business in a physical setting, would you buy an office suite tucked away in a part of town that very few people frequent, or would you try for a nice storefront with heavy traffic?

Now I know, this means more competition, however, simply by having a more prime piece of real estate, all of your efforts are going to go further. For instance, think of posting a link to your website on a forum, or just the action itself, of a potential visitor mousing over your link and seeing your domain name. How likely is someone to click http://www.thepoint.com versus http://www.gettothepointalready.com? Obviously, if it’s a long tail keyword EMD, perhaps that appeals to them, however, getting to the point appeals to them too, and makes your “brand” look much more trustworthy.

A catchy domain name is good too, however, we’re about to start talking about traffic, so unless you’re going to be doing some serious SEO, some other considerations need to be made as to how you will get traffic. 

One thing that people don’t consider much is type-in traffic, meaning, someone just says “I wonder what’s at http://www.whatever.com.” Just based on the keyword phrase, they’ll go check it out. While this isn’t the norm, and you won’t get a ton of traffic this way, most likely, it will lead to some traffic, if you have a shorter domain name that is spot on for your target audience.

What I’m getting at is this: if you’re not ranking highly in Google, and you’re not doing any other promotion of your website, type-in traffic is all you have. Of course, you’d want to do much more than that, but when you’re starting out and you don’t have big G sending organic searchers to your website, or may never reach that point, consider that type-in traffic is free.

For instance, if you are doing PPC advertising and paying, say, even a low amount such as $0.10 per visit to your website, every type-in visitor you receive is basically $0.10 earned, in a manner of thinking. I’m not saying type-ins are going to be a huge source of traffic, but, it can be a nice added stream of traffic, if your domain name is chosen wisely.

Furthermore, having a domain name that is higher up in the hierarchy of keyword group(s) you’re targeting allows you to go after long tail with increased power, since not ALL of the long tail keywords are part of your domain name, but some will be, and they’ll be echoed in your actual page / post URL.

Also, consider the value of your website, if you decided to put it up on the open market one day. Lots of factors contribute to what it should go for, and what it will actually sell for, however, if you have the same stats and revenue on two websites, with the only difference being a lengthy long tail domain name, I’ll virtually guarantee you that the shorter domain name will sell for more, simply because there is more opportunity for higher search volumes that match the domain name.

Also, from a branding standpoint, it’s much easier to brand a shorter domain name, than a long tail domain name, and easier to advertise it using methods that are a bit outside of the box.

For instance, if you’ve got a really great domain name that is only two to three words, you could even get into image watermarking. Simply add a solid color bar to the bottom of all of your images, with your domain address clearly posted within that bar. Then, whenever you share that image off site, you’re putting your domain name in someone’s face, and if it’s short enough, they just might remember it, and type it in, even if there is no link to it.

Also, this saves you a lot of trouble, as you’re not posting a link to your website. The audience, and the moderators at wherever you are posting said pictures probably wouldn’t even know you are the owner of that site, unless you make it apparent, however, what I’m getting at is that you open a lot of opportunities to advertise your brand that just wouldn’t work that well if you have some long drawn out domain name, and you don’t have to be allowed to post a text link.

Additionally, images are becoming more and more useful in the world of affiliate marketing, through the sharing of images. If you can get a few watermarked images to go semi-viral in your niche, you could be looking at some pretty nice traffic. You could probably even take a shot at creating a MEME with the hopes of going viral, with your watermark appended to the image. 

Keep in mind to watermark tastefully. You want it to look professional and not overpowering or intrusive. You want it to add to the image, not take away. Avoid posting the watermark over the actual image itself.

Using this approach, even without big G, you could realistically draw traffic to your site, with only investing time instead of money. The money was invested pre-launch, in the quality of your domain name. Your business should be something you’re proud of, even if it’s just one of many affiliate marketing websites. 

You will feel more positive about investing into the website, since for one, you spent more money on it, and two, it’s a more prominent domain.  Gauge your own level of excitement when you’re searching for domain names. If you’re not excited about it, how do you expect to keep working on it for months and years to come to ensure it’s profitable? Also, if you’re not excited about it, how do you expect your visitors to be excited about it?

Consider how many long tail domains you’ve purchased for cheap (if you’re a seasoned affiliate marketer), and look at what wound up happening with them. There’s probably a good chance that quite a few of them, you never even got around to building, or monetizing, or maybe you just let them expire when their registration came up for renewal, etc. Stop wasting time and money jumping from one thing to the next, and focus on quality first, and quantity second. Quantity is still very important, however, quality should be first.

If you’re putting hours and hours into domain names that are long shots to start with, think of how far you could go with a quality, high search volume, exact match domain name. Think about how you would feel working on a domain like that, versus one of the cheap long tail, long shot domain names you’ve worked on in the past.

Even if you’re not spending a couple hundred bucks, even spending $50 on a domain name should allow you to up the ante for yourself, and result in a much more reputable domain name.

You’ve spent $50 on much worse investments haven’t you? Ever purchased a crappy info product? I think that’s enough said.

Give it a try, and I’m sure you will feel more energized about working on the site, will have a brighter outlook (which is very important), and you’ll be more heavily invested from the word go since you paid a pretty penny for the domain, rather than using a 99 cent promo code.

The Best WordPress Security Plugin, Hands Down

If you’d like to secure your WordPress website without spending a great deal of time doing so, the best solution is to use one of the freely available WordPress security plugins.

There are quite a few options, but my security plugin of choice is Better WP Security.

I’ve installed and configured this WordPress security plugin on hundreds of WordPress installations, and I’ve never had a single WordPress property hacked with it on duty.

So, why do I like Better WP Security versus the rest?

For starters, it covers a lot of problem areas, and allows you to customize the settings for your particular needs. It also handles database backups, and will send you those backups via eMail attachments hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

I usually don’t enable all of the security settings, as some of the settings can be a little intrusive or bothersome. I don’t need all of them enabled to secure the website satisfactorily, but, they are there in the case that I decide to enable them for a particular site that needs a few extra layers of security.

The basic configuration I use covers the following points:

• Your WordPress header is revealing as little information as possible.

• Non-administrators cannot see available updates.

• The admin user has been removed.

• The user with id 1 has been removed.

• Your table prefix is not wp_.

• You have scheduled regular backups of your WordPress database.

• You are blocking known bad hosts and agents with HackRepair.com’s blacklist..

• Your login area is protected from brute force attacks.

• Your .htaccess file is fully secured.

• Your installation is actively blocking attackers trying to scan your site for vulnerabilities.

• Your installation does not accept long URLs.

• Better WP Security is allowed to write to wp-config.php and .htaccess.

• wp-config.php and .htacess are not writeable.

• Version information is obscured to all non admin users.

For me, this is enough. I can configure the settings quite quickly. At first, it would take me about half an hour to go through everything, but as I have become increasingly familiar with the installation and configuration process, I can usually knock this out in 10 to 15 minutes.

To give you an idea of the performance of this plugin and it’s settings, I once had a WordPress website owner contact me, telling me that his website had been hacked. When I visited his website, there were various “graffiti” present representing a particular “cyber army” which was claiming the blame for hacking his website.

He supplied me with access to his cPanel, and within about 10 minutes, I had regained access to the dashboard. I then went through all of the active theme files one by one, removing code added by the hackers.

Then, I installed Better WP Security, and configured it using the settings I normally use, without even activating any of the additional security settings, except for those listed above.

Within a couple of hours, I began receiving eMail notifications that someone was locked out of the site. Since the hackers were using proxies, I got quite a few of these notifications. I then went into the security dashboard, and permanently banned all of those proxy IP addresses manually.

Over the next few days, I got more notifications, and more notifications. The hackers were attempting to brute force their way into the website, however, they could not defeat Better WP Security.

In my opinion, unless you’ve installed a third party plugin that has security vulnerabilities, Better WP Security will keep your website hack proof, unless someone with a lot of time and computing power comes along, who also has great skill at hacking WordPress websites, and they are hell bent on getting in. Then, perhaps your site might get hacked. I would imagine that before it did, you’d probably receive enough alerts from the plugin to know that you had better contact your host, and let them know someone was attacking you, ensure you had up to date backups of everything, and perhaps enable a few more layers of security temporarily, until the hacker got tired of failure, and moved on.

I recommend Better WP Security to anyone running a WordPress website, it’s protection is excellent.

Should you need assistance in installing or configuring Better WP Security, I’m always around to lend a helping hand, via my WordPress Maintenance Service business linked in the navigation menu here on the Digi Purpose blog.

Elegant Themes & Forums: You Don’t Have a Compatible Theme!?

Today, I was setting up a new WordPress website that is a forum. 

I decided to use the bbPress plugin for the forums, and then began looking for a nice theme for the website, that has bbPress support.

The reason for this is that if a given theme doesn’t have bbPress support, the bbPress content won’t be styled up like the rest of the website, meaning the developer (in this case, me) will have to create custom CSS styling. Also, since I would be using a theme, I would have the task of implementing styles that fit that theme well. While this isn’t that tall of a task, it’s a waste of time in my book, because I can find a theme with bbPress support, and completely skip all of this extra work, and focus on the important part: making the forum as good as possible to provide valuable content to the visitors, and to also focus on building the forum community, and marketing the forums.

I stopped by Elegant Themes to see what they had to offer, but after looking through their 80+ themes, I was unable to find a single theme which looked like a forum, or was specifically tagged as a forum based theme. Also, there was no mention of bbPress support anywhere. I decided to contact Elegant Themes, and ask them directly if any of their themes had bbPress support. A few hours later, their reply came, and I was disappointed.

Elegant Themes does not have a single forum based theme, or any themes with bbPress, or other forum plugin, support.

This really blows my mind, since Elegant Themes doesn’t offer single purchases of their themes, and offers all 80+ themes for a yearly subscription price. I’m not saying that isn’t a good value, however, if you’re marketing a theme subscription to be a one stop shop for themes for any type of website, not having a single theme based on a forum site is really missing the mark, in my opinion.

Even if there was only one theme that was forum based, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to a popular theme developer like Elegant Themes to build at least one theme with bbPress support, or create their own forum platform, or, if I was them, a theme with support for all of the most popular forum plugins, so that a customer wishing to setup a forum website could use the theme, and decide for themselves which forum plugin was best for them. I would even take it a step further and have at least one theme with support for BuddyPress, as it’s gained huge popularity, and social is very popular right now.

I don’t really mean to bad mouth Elegant Themes, but for instance, their affiliate program boasts that it pays out over $1,000,000 per year to 21,000+ affiliates. If your business is paying it’s affiliates over a million bucks a year, you would think you could spend the time and money to develop a few themes that support popular platforms like bbPress and BuddyPress.

Take into consideration the fact that standalone, one person development ventures on ThemeForest develop themes with bbPress and BuddyPress support. Some even specialize in these platforms, and virtually all of the themes they develop have support for these popular plugins, and more, built right in.

If I was the CEO of Elegant Themes, I would have my own premium forum plugin as part of the subscription plan that includes their premium plugins, along with their premium themes, and perhaps even a social platform plugin. At the very least, there would be support for bbPress and BuddyPress, if nothing else.

Think of how many people out there don’t purchase an Elegant Themes subscription because of this, or, have an Elegant Themes subscription, but then have to go elsewhere to purchase a premium WordPress theme or plugin, or both, to handle a forum based WordPress site.

One Simple WordPress Security Measure that Makes a Big Impact

When you’re dealing with WordPress, security should always be an area that you take seriously.

Remember, WordPress is open source, and as such, hackers trying to break into sites that run on the WordPress platform have access to it’s source code. This in itself isn’t that big of a deal, however, the fact that most WordPress websites are running third party created plugins as well, adds to the security risk. 

Perhaps a plugin developer has left a security vulnerability in their plugin unknowingly, and once this vulnerability is discovered by the right hacker, every website running that particular plugin are ripe for the picking.

I’m not warning you to batten down the hatches, go sit in a closet, and say hail Mary’s, security just needs to be on your radar.

Also, you may not even know that your website has been hacked, until a much later date, depending on what the hacker decides to do once they’ve gained access to your website. Perhaps they just want to take your site offline, in which case, I hope you have a backup. Perhaps they just want to make a fool out of your website, and post unsavory content all over it to damage your image and wreak havoc. Perhaps they want to be crafty and see what affiliate advertisements you’re running, sign up for those affiliate programs, and then replace your affiliate links with theirs, so that your website traffic brings them commissions instead of you! The point is, it’s up to them, and I can promise you, no matter what they decide to do, it’s not going to be a good thing for you. They may even contact you and try to sell you security improvements based on the fact that they’ve already hacked your website. Now there’s a killer sales pitch, if they haven’t touched anything, and they’re very brave.

One very simple security improvement you can make easily which has a big positive impact on WordPress security is your admin username. Remember, the default username is ‘admin.’ If you’re running the default username, you’ve handed a would be hacker 50% of the login credentials to your dashboard before they even lift a finger to attempt to gain entry. This is definitely a bad idea, but I see it all the time.

Also, another mistake I see all the time is displaying the admin username in the context of the by line, e.g. “by admin.” 

In this case, even if you have changed the default username, you’re advertising it openly, so again, you’ve handed any would be hackers 50% of your login credentials.

You cannot change usernames in the “User” dashboard menu, but some security plugins support this feature. What you can do from dashboard, however, is to create a new admin user, with a custom username, and then remove the original admin user.

Also, you can control the publicly displayed author name in the user dashboard. However, the link to the author archive will remain to be the author’s username, for instance: http://website.com/author/admin

This means that if you’re displaying the by line, with a link to the author archive, a hacker can still very easily find your username.

My recommendation is that if you’re not willing to take the steps necessary to protect against brute force attacks, do not display the by line at all. This can be done by manually editing your theme files. Remember, you can login to WordPress using the username, nickname, or display name of a given user! Even if you’re displaying the by line with your display name, you’ve still given the hacker your username.

Even after doing all of this, search engines will index your author archive page, so it’s a good idea to add a line to your robots.txt file to disallow indexing of author archives. If your author archive link isn’t freely available somewhere online, the hacker will have to figure out someway to guess your username, and your password, thus making any brute force attack twice as difficult, and theoretically, take twice as long, and twice as much computing.

Your best bet is always going to be to protect your website from brute force attacks, however, taking measures like these are always steps in the right direction, if you do not need the author archives for anything specific.

Child Please! No Really, Please Use a Child Theme

As a developer who does a lot of work with WordPress, I run into the following scenario all of the time:

A developer has made custom changes to a theme, and following an update to said theme, the custom changes go “poof” and are gone with the wind!

Then comes the interesting part: determining if there is a backup of the files containing the custom code, determining which files contained custom code, obtaining those files from the backup if it exists, and then reincorporating that custom code into the newly updated theme or plugin. However, if I’m the one doing the reincorporation, a child theme will be getting created, from the word go.

The reason is that creating a child theme will prevent this same issue from arising the next time an update is released for said theme.

While this approach isn’t fool proof, and can cause some issues with the new version of the theme, they’re easily remedied! The best part is, you do not lose code. Worst case scenario, the developer will have to copy and paste the contents of the new version of the files in question into those same files in the child theme, and then situate the custom code appropriately. This is much easier to deal with than having to find lost code, or recreate lost code if there is no backup available, all the while, leaving your site gimped and missing the custom code, that probably does something fairly important (or you wouldn’t have had it custom coded to begin with).

The next time you need a developer to customize any theme files, make sure they are using a child theme, and if they don’t plan on using a child theme, request that they do, ask them why they do not use child themes, and promptly replace them with someone else more savvy with WordPress (if you really get brave, I’m available for such rescue operations).

Premium WordPress Themes: Subscription Versus Single Purchase

If you’re in the market for a premium WordPress theme, or are “in the market” selling premium WordPress themes, there are two popular methods of offering a theme for purchase.

The first, and most popular method, is presenting the theme as a single purchase product, licensing the purchaser to use the theme in accordance with that license. The license may limit use of the theme to one website, or it may allow unlimited usage by the customer on as many websites as they like.

The second method, which is becoming more popular, is to offer a monthly subscription price, and granting usage rights to the subscriber for any theme included in the subscription.

Depending upon your needs, you’ll need to decide which of these approaches will work best for you.

In my experience, purchasing a single theme is the way to go if you are a niche website and find a premium WordPress theme specifically for your niche. For instance, if you’re a night club, and find a great night club theme, it would make sense to go with that theme, rather than purchasing some other premium theme or collection of themes, and then trying to bend that theme to your specific needs. I’m not saying this can’t be done, or won’t yield good results if done right, however, if you want to spend less time and money on development, using a quality theme specifically for your industry makes a lot of sense.

If you own various websites, and want them all to have a professional look, and they reside in various niches or areas of industry, then a subscription may be right for you. Believe it or not, many times the monthly subscription price is approximately equal to the average cost of a single premium theme. The only catch is, you’ll have to pay that monthly subscription each month to continue using your subscribed to premium themes. The monthly fee is one area which usually deters many single website owners from signing up for a theme subscription.

Money is always an issue, so let’s make some quick considerations for typical situations. If you’re the owner of a single site, purchasing a single theme makes the most sense. You’ll pay a one time fee for a theme, and if you decide that you want to move to a different theme later on, you’ll only have to pay another one time fee, and you’re done.

If you own various websites, a theme subscription website is a great solution, for the short term. Consider, however, that 3 years from now, you’ll still be forking out $39, or $49, or whatever the monthly subscription price is. Total up all of those fees, and you’ll quickly see that you could just as easily purchase a single premium theme for each site in your portfolio and save money. The catch is that you might not have enough cash to afford a premium theme for all of your sites up front, and you don’t want to rely on free themes. That’s perfectly understandable, so I would suggest getting a theme subscription, and slowly replacing your themes with single purchased premium themes. I would do this in the order of importance of the sites you own.

Consider the focus of each site, and honestly evaluate how it is coming along as far as fulfilling it’s potential. Perhaps the site is doing very well, or you may have discovered that the potential audience just isn’t interested in your topic, or, perhaps you lose passion to maintain a certain site. Be honest with yourself before purchasing a premium theme for a specific site. Pick a few sites that are doing very well, and that you are passionate about, and know you will be maintaining for months or years to come, and one by one, purchase premium themes for these sites, while using your theme subscription for the rest of your sites.

Undoubtedly, if you regularly purchase domains and setup new websites, the theme subscription will still be a relevant service to pay for, however, one by one, you’ll be getting a more specialized theme up and running on your most successful sites.

The idea is to maintain this approach until you’ve gotten premium themes on all of your successful sites.

The choice then is whether or not the theme subscription is still needed. I would consider the sites that I was still using themes from the subscription on, and honestly ask myself if the need was still there for a premium theme. If so, I would simply buy a premium theme for that site and put it on my list of sites to work hard to bring up to par in the success column.

The fact of the matter is, if the site isn’t achieving it’s intended purpose, and / or isn’t turning a profit, continually spending money on it doesn’t make sense. In fact, I would say the best thing to do in that case would be to either cut that project, or put some deep thought into how to turn the site around.

There is definitely value in theme subscription sites, however, I look at these marketplaces as a temporary fix. Utilizing them to improve the theme on a number of websites all at once is very useful, however, over time, the amount of money invested just doesn’t jive when considering that you could purchase another equally good theme for a one time fee, and it will probably be more specific to your niche or industry.

From a seller standpoint, I understand the theme subscription business model, however, at the end of the day, I think single theme sales will always trump subscription based businesses, simply because eventually, the customer will stop paying for their subscription, and when they do, all of their websites which were using those themes have to find a new theme. This is a terrible situation for the customer, especially given the fact that they’ve paid you for months, or perhaps even years, for those themes.

One thing I have not seen from a theme subscription marketplace yet is a customer loyalty bonus. The idea of this would be to award subscribers for their business, and not leave them in the above stated situation. I believe this would also greatly improve customer retention, as well as sales conversions. Let’s say for every 3 months that a subscriber pays their fee, they can choose one premium theme from the set of offered themes to be marked as “purchased” the same way a single theme license is done. This means the customer would have a permanent license to a theme of their choice for every 3 months that they continued using the subscription service.

Given this setup, I would be much more likely to use a theme subscription service, and I would use it for much longer, probably. The customer loyalty program would resolve the main drawbacks I have to using theme subscription marketplaces.